@M70 Outstanding point, this is easily the best and most civil forum/online community I’ve engaged with on like 20+ years online.
Speaking of artistic “Total Creative Control” it’s best for artists to have a lot of control etc. Yet, I can’t help but think of this example of an artist with Total Creative Control.
No matter how good an artist maybe sometimes they need to be checked and told their idea needs polished or revised.
Tom Clancy is another great example of TCC gone wrong. Initially he had to listen to his editors and his first half dozen books or so were fantastic. Then he became a Big Name and didn’t have to listen and his work mostly turned into crap.
It’s bizarre but sometimes some restriction(s) or an editor actually stimulates the creativity process and end result 
Many who think they have “incredible” hearing can’t hear in the high frequency range.
Then there’s the folks who actually can hear the difference between two mastering LBR’s (Laser Beam Recorders aka cutters).* One can run a bit to bit comparison on the data from CD’s from the two different cutters and it will match perfectly according to the data verification software. Yet some well trained professional audio engineers can consistently hear the difference and prove they hear the difference in blind and double blind testing.
The data verification says the two CD’s from two different LBR’s are the same. The Golden Ear says the two CD’s sound different and prove they DO HEAR a difference. How is that possible?
Welcome to the not so wonderful world of jitter aka clock jitter or timing errors. All the data is indeed present on both CD’s but one has high jitter and sounds like crap. The high jitter CD may have all of the data but that data isn’t exactly located at the correct time. That a superficial description of jitter. The human ear excels at detecting this sort of discrepancy.
How can that be? The bit for bit verification says everything is there.
In a very basic layman’s terms, the data is all there but thanks to merge bits that aren’t accounted for the data verification process the data might not be in the exact “location” it should be in.
The good news is tight specification and rigorous QA to ensure the cut master had low jitter reduced this to a non-issue eventually. Likewise, QA checks on the replicated CD samples to ensured products had low jitter.
However, in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, jitter was a nebulous issue until proper test equipment and specifications were developed.
*Much to my surprise, I was able to hear the difference in LBR’s in a blind listening test with six different CD samples of the same content.
Two true audio experts ranked the six CD from best to worst. They were in perfect agreement in their rankings.
I was tested with the samples. I ranked them exactly backwards of how the experts did. What sounded good to them sound bad to me and vice-versa. That was pretty disappointing.
They pointed out it was obvious what was happening. I consistently heard the difference in the six CD’s but I didn’t have a professionally trained/calibrated ear to know what was good. They said it would be possible learn the nuances of what was good since I could hear the differences.
In other words, I was musically ignorant on nuances and needed musical education.
For home listening, my view is find speakers you like and build everything else around them. JBL’s for my budget. I liked JBL’s jazz friendly crossovers, mid-range & high end and overall versatile nature.
Never understood why they were in so many studios. One day a producer i knew enlightened me: Everyone uses NS-10s because everyone uses NS-10. His home listening speakers were NS-10 for the simple reason that those were at least one set of speakers that any given record was mixed on. 
I did, a l m o s t buy a pair…once. 
